Whoever designed this is, frankly, a total asshole. This takes form-over-function to a whole new level. Is it upgradeable at ALL? I find this design to be reprehensible from a practicality and utility perspective. This is a workstation-class machine, what the fuck?

Meh... Another shiny toy from Apple, that's the norm. Not that I'm knocking Apple, they make great products, but anyone that can push cards into slots can build a PC with same specs or better for half the price (I'm betting on 3,500 and up).

This might be a nice machine to do a whole home integration with, running all electronics and entertainment out of a central location.....

There's a PC with 12 Xenon cores and PCIe flash storage that achieves 1 GBps write and 1.25 GBps read? Dual firepro GPUs with 6GB RAM each? [..]And a couple that don't matter to everyone, but do to many:

Runs (and officially supports) OS X?

Add a PCI-e SSD and two FireGL cards to the current Mac Pro, problem solved.

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In a tiny, low temp, highly attractive, presumably silent package?

While not tiny, the current Mac Pro case is low temp, attractive and relatively silent.

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6 Thunderbolt 2 ports?

These could be placed on to an ordinary PCI-e video card and thus give the current Mac Pro such capabilities.

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Built in the US?

Nothing stopped Apple from building the current Mac Pro in the USA.

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The base price of the previous gen mac pro was $2500, by the way.

The base price of the new Mac Pro will likely be higher due to the default config of dual GPU's.

This fails on several fronts for animation, vfx and editing. For animation and VFX, I would worry about heat, running all CPU's at 100% for 24 hours is not uncommone when rendering 3D, and I would miss CUDA support.

For Video editing you will need a bunch of breakout boxes, likely including 10GbE, video out (Blackmagic et.al.) and external storage, so the setup would not be very clean. In many professional editing suites the machines are placed in the server room, leaving just keyboards, screens and projectors in the suites. I wouldn't know how to put this thing in a server rack. Rack mounted computers, pull in cold air at the front, and blow out warm at the back, this pulls the air from below and blows it out the top.

But then again, by making FinalCut into a dummed down a consumer product and killing Shake, Apple servers and raids, they've shown clearly that they don't really care about the high end video and vfx market.

This isn't a machine for gamers. I don't think it's even a machine for graphic artists as both MBP and iMac have enough power. It's a computer for people working for video. Animation, FX, and Editing. All those roles are big on using external HDs for project based work and Thunderbolt 2 is going to be the game changer for upgrading the processing power.

I would even hazard a guess given the Pixar presentation at the show with the hardware that this machine is the direct result of asking Pixar folks for input on a work station.

This fails on several fronts for animation, vfx and editing. For animation and VFX, I would worry about heat, running all CPU's at 100% for 24 hours is not uncommone when rendering 3D, and I would miss CUDA support.

For Video editing you will need a bunch of breakout boxes, likely including 10GbE, video out (Blackmagic et.al.) and external storage, so the setup would not be very clean. In many professional editing suites the machines are placed in the server room, leaving just keyboards, screens and projectors in the suites. I wouldn't know how to put this thing in a server rack. Rack mounted computers, pull in cold air at the front, and blow out warm at the back, this pulls the air from below and blows it out the top.

But then again, by making FinalCut into a dummed down a consumer product and killing Shake, Apple servers and raids, they've shown clearly that they don't really care about the high end video and vfx market.

This isn't a machine for gamers. I don't think it's even a machine for graphic artists as both MBP and iMac have enough power. It's a computer for people working for video. Animation, FX, and Editing. All those roles are big on using external HDs for project based work and Thunderbolt 2 is going to be the game changer for upgrading the processing power.

I would even hazard a guess given the Pixar presentation at the show with the hardware that this machine is the direct result of asking Pixar folks for input on a work station.

They don't care about the back-end that much anymore (thus no X-Serve). I'm not a professional animator / video editor myself, but as far as I know / have been told, it's pretty common for studios to have OS X on the desks and then Linux for the render farm. Has been for a while.

I suppose the largest problem Pro people might have is how fast these machines might get up and running after a hardware fault. If what I hear is true, replacing a motherboard is going to be prohibitive - specially if the CPU and GPU are BGAs, that is, soldered on the motherboard.

For the vast majority of office and home networks, however, you're still *maybe'* at Gig Ethernet, and there's a LOT of 100 installs out there in the world.

I'm curious who you think are buying Mac Pros ... you seem to think it's generic office workers. People whose work is such that 100Mbps is sufficient aren't using machines that start at $3000. They're on cheap desktops (mini, iMac) or more likely laptops.

Honestly, if I had a user who said "but I don't like external boxes" I would, kindly, tell them to get over it.

Even if every single user needs a clunky expansion box? Because the people who don't need that kind of expansion aren't using Mac Pros anyway.

Loss of drive bays is obnoxious, but honestly, everyone just uses NAS or SAN storage anyway, so it's not the end of the world. it's the lack of slot expansions that are the problem.

If every single user needs an expansion box, you didn't do your research ahead of time when you spec'd out the purchase for your user base.

The only thing I can see going forward where the mainstream, non-edge case use of a Mac Pro in a professional setting would get annoying due to an obligatory hardware need would be the aforementioned seeming lack of 10GigE-only dongles. I suspect that if there's a real need for this it will be rectified by someone wanting to sell a lot of adapters for a reasonable price.

As for the drives, yeah, it would be nice to have at least one extra bay, but if you're having to save tons and tons of data on your local machine for projects that you're not immediately working with and that isn't being actually stored and backed up in some sort of SAN/whatever solution, you're playing with some serious fire.

For the vast majority of office and home networks, however, you're still *maybe'* at Gig Ethernet, and there's a LOT of 100 installs out there in the world.

I'm curious who you think are buying Mac Pros ... you seem to think it's generic office workers. People whose work is such that 100Mbps is sufficient aren't using machines that start at $3000. They're on cheap desktops (mini, iMac) or more likely laptops.

Nope, I know who is doing it, since I support them.

As I said, GigE is the common top-end to-the-desktop speed. I've yet to have a Mac user come to me and complain that they don't have 10GigE to the desktop.

This fails on several fronts for animation, vfx and editing. For animation and VFX, I would worry about heat, running all CPU's at 100% for 24 hours is not uncommone when rendering 3D, and I would miss CUDA support.

For Video editing you will need a bunch of breakout boxes, likely including 10GbE, video out (Blackmagic et.al.) and external storage, so the setup would not be very clean. In many professional editing suites the machines are placed in the server room, leaving just keyboards, screens and projectors in the suites. I wouldn't know how to put this thing in a server rack. Rack mounted computers, pull in cold air at the front, and blow out warm at the back, this pulls the air from below and blows it out the top.

But then again, by making FinalCut into a dummed down a consumer product and killing Shake, Apple servers and raids, they've shown clearly that they don't really care about the high end video and vfx market.

This isn't a machine for gamers. I don't think it's even a machine for graphic artists as both MBP and iMac have enough power. It's a computer for people working for video. Animation, FX, and Editing. All those roles are big on using external HDs for project based work and Thunderbolt 2 is going to be the game changer for upgrading the processing power.

I would even hazard a guess given the Pixar presentation at the show with the hardware that this machine is the direct result of asking Pixar folks for input on a work station.

They don't care about the back-end that much anymore (thus no X-Serve). I'm not a professional animator / video editor myself, but as far as I know / have been told, it's pretty common for studios to have OS X on the desks and then Linux for the render farm. Has been for a while.

In VFX it's mostly either Linux or Windows. A lot of studios run Linux on workstations, servers and farm, with either a few Mac or Windows boxes to run Photoshop and Z-Brush. Some of the major 3D packages don't even run on OSX, like 3D Studio Max (Windows) and XSI (Windows, Linux), while Maya runs on all three.

This fails on several fronts for animation, vfx and editing. For animation and VFX, I would worry about heat, running all CPU's at 100% for 24 hours is not uncommone when rendering 3D, and I would miss CUDA support.

For Video editing you will need a bunch of breakout boxes, likely including 10GbE, video out (Blackmagic et.al.) and external storage, so the setup would not be very clean. In many professional editing suites the machines are placed in the server room, leaving just keyboards, screens and projectors in the suites. I wouldn't know how to put this thing in a server rack. Rack mounted computers, pull in cold air at the front, and blow out warm at the back, this pulls the air from below and blows it out the top.

But then again, by making FinalCut into a dummed down a consumer product and killing Shake, Apple servers and raids, they've shown clearly that they don't really care about the high end video and vfx market.

This isn't a machine for gamers. I don't think it's even a machine for graphic artists as both MBP and iMac have enough power. It's a computer for people working for video. Animation, FX, and Editing. All those roles are big on using external HDs for project based work and Thunderbolt 2 is going to be the game changer for upgrading the processing power.

I would even hazard a guess given the Pixar presentation at the show with the hardware that this machine is the direct result of asking Pixar folks for input on a work station.

They don't care about the back-end that much anymore (thus no X-Serve). I'm not a professional animator / video editor myself, but as far as I know / have been told, it's pretty common for studios to have OS X on the desks and then Linux for the render farm. Has been for a while.

In VFX it's mostly either Linux or Windows. A lot of studios run Linux on workstations, servers and farm, with either a few Mac or Windows boxes to run Photoshop and Z-Brush. Some of the major 3D packages don't even run on OSX, like 3D Studio Max (Windows) and XSI (Windows, Linux), while Maya runs on all three.

Honestly, if I had a user who said "but I don't like external boxes" I would, kindly, tell them to get over it.

Even if every single user needs a clunky expansion box? Because the people who don't need that kind of expansion aren't using Mac Pros anyway.

Loss of drive bays is obnoxious, but honestly, everyone just uses NAS or SAN storage anyway, so it's not the end of the world. it's the lack of slot expansions that are the problem.

If every single user needs an expansion box, you didn't do your research ahead of time when you spec'd out the purchase for your user base.

The only thing I can see going forward where the mainstream, non-edge case use of a Mac Pro in a professional setting would get annoying due to an obligatory hardware need would be the aforementioned seeming lack of 10GigE-only dongles. I suspect that if there's a real need for this it will be rectified by someone wanting to sell a lot of adapters for a reasonable price.

As for the drives, yeah, it would be nice to have at least one extra bay, but if you're having to save tons and tons of data on your local machine for projects that you're not immediately working with and that isn't being actually stored and backed up in some sort of SAN/whatever solution, you're playing with some serious fire.

Regular desktops, and especially laptops, have become so capable that using a Mac Pro at all is an edge case. Hence the need to cater to those needs. For most people, a Macbook Pro is sufficient, or Macbook Pro plus network storage and compute\render cluster.

The only people still buying Mac Pros were the people that needed that kind of expandability, and after waiting all this time, the new Mac Pro doesn't have the features that made people buy it in the first place!

I think you nailed the reason why the Mac Pro has changed. Apple is clearly looking for a much wider audience than those you have described.

Honestly, if I had a user who said "but I don't like external boxes" I would, kindly, tell them to get over it.

Even if every single user needs a clunky expansion box? Because the people who don't need that kind of expansion aren't using Mac Pros anyway.

Loss of drive bays is obnoxious, but honestly, everyone just uses NAS or SAN storage anyway, so it's not the end of the world. it's the lack of slot expansions that are the problem.

If every single user needs an expansion box, you didn't do your research ahead of time when you spec'd out the purchase for your user base.

The only thing I can see going forward where the mainstream, non-edge case use of a Mac Pro in a professional setting would get annoying due to an obligatory hardware need would be the aforementioned seeming lack of 10GigE-only dongles. I suspect that if there's a real need for this it will be rectified by someone wanting to sell a lot of adapters for a reasonable price.

As for the drives, yeah, it would be nice to have at least one extra bay, but if you're having to save tons and tons of data on your local machine for projects that you're not immediately working with and that isn't being actually stored and backed up in some sort of SAN/whatever solution, you're playing with some serious fire.

Regular desktops, and especially laptops, have become so capable that using a Mac Pro at all is an edge case. Hence the need to cater to those needs. For most people, a Macbook Pro is sufficient, or Macbook Pro plus network storage and compute\render cluster.

I guess we'll see how it pans out over the next year or two, but I suspect that this new Mac Pro 1) was tediously researched as to the market that actually uses them and 2) will sell pretty well.

Just who does Apple expect to sell these to? You'd have to be prodigiously wasteful to buy one of these for a business, because you'll be forced to retire it as soon as any of its components are obsolete. A 2006 Mac Pro is still a perfectly functional machine, largely because you can easily replace the video and add new functionality (like a RAID controller, for instance) through the multiple expansion slots. You'd probably be running Windows on it now, because Apple abandoned it, but the hardware was awesome, and remains solid even now, seven years later.

This, on the other hand, is a showpiece; once something isn't good enough anymore, too bad, so sad, buy a new one.

You are missing the entire point of Thunderbolt 2. And before you say "But nobody will adopt that!", think of Apple's history with similar scenarios. Not saying it's right or wrong, but they are the first ones to solder components to the board, get rid of optical drives, make use of non-user-replaceable batteries, etc., in the name of better functionality (at the cost of reduced flexibility).

Besides, they certainly are not catering to businesses that retain 7 year old workstations.

For the vast majority of office and home networks, however, you're still *maybe'* at Gig Ethernet, and there's a LOT of 100 installs out there in the world.

I'm curious who you think are buying Mac Pros ... you seem to think it's generic office workers. People whose work is such that 100Mbps is sufficient aren't using machines that start at $3000. They're on cheap desktops (mini, iMac) or more likely laptops.

Nope, I know who is doing it, since I support them.

As I said, GigE is the common top-end to-the-desktop speed. I've yet to have a Mac user come to me and complain that they don't have 10GigE to the desktop.

I guess we're just in different worlds then. For me, if you need a Mac Pro then there's some unusual thing going on that made a laptop or iMac unusable. Why would you run a pricy specialised machine and then not run the fastest storage and\or network connections into it? If you didn't need that sort of thing, then you wouldn't have a Mac Pro in the first place.

These are machines that routinely have FC HBAs dropped into them. That'd be completely crazy for non-edge case machines that don't need the fastest performance. But they do, or you wouldn't have bought it to begin with.

Honestly, our frustrations with the Mac Pro is a big part of the reason we've significantly cooled off towards Apple these days and have been buying PCs. This new machine just continues that frustration. Ok, we've finally got speed, but we've lost the internal slots. Damn it!

I am not sure what market Apple is going for with this thing. Pretty powerful out of the box but little to no upgradability or internal expandability and good luck rack mounting it. Is the Mac Mini really Apple's answer to the (small) section of the enterprise market that wants or needs Apple based servers? First the super thin for no good reason iMac that still takes up the same amount of desktop space as the fat version but at the cost of switching to 100% laptop components and now this thing? I already have a Hackintosh and it is looking less and less like I will ever own another Apple desktop.

Whoever designed this is, frankly, a total asshole. This takes form-over-function to a whole new level. Is it upgradeable at ALL? I find this design to be reprehensible from a practicality and utility perspective. This is a workstation-class machine, what the fuck?

Nothing personal, but your comment is representative to me of most all of the other comments of people who can't stand change or see a different way of doing things.

I personally really like it! I have been gravitating towards modular computing over the last few years and I think this is a great idea! Thunderbolt2 (TB2) will allow one to install a PCIe external box for whatever card your heart could desire, plus this would actually be more usable in the long run and cost effiecient than a box with slots. What happens when your box with slots is out dated and PCIe has been shunned for PCI-X? Your box with slots becomes worthless, unless you replace the motherboard. What happens when the next storage interface comes out? Your box with slots becomes outdated, or becomes an internal spaghetti mess (along with the associated thermal issues, as you plug in a new interface card and reroute new hard drive cables. What happens when your box with slots runs out of slots? Anybody's box with slots have 36 slots? Thunderbolt has been designed to eventually give a throughput that should cover the throughput of PCIe, PCI-X, and whatever the next bus is beyond that, with the added benefit that it would be backwards compatible. Need a spinning disk upgrade, connect via TB2, need a new PCIe card, connect via TB2, this would still work 5 years from now just as good as it would work today.

What I would like to see is Apple take this a step further and make all their computers connectable to each other via TB2 with the OS goodies to make connected computers into a cluster computer. Why waste old processing power when it could just be additive onto your new machine?

1. The unavoidable comparisons to a cigarette ash can will be very temporary, like the few days people made fun of the iPad name, comparing it to a feminine care product, BECAUSE cigarette smoking will soon become illegal as a matter of Federal law. I should say tobacco smoking, because weed will be legalized.

2. Re: the two ATI FirePro GPUs: It wasn’t said that they would be used in >parallel< for GPGPU – long overdue on the Mac and a feature of PCs for 8 or 9 years.

3. Will having the two GPUs serve only to drive more displays as is the case if you install a second GPU card into the present Mac Pro? (That seemed to be the suggestion.)

4. Or, will (See 2) [Mac] OS X “Mavericks” finally include parallel processing of multiple GPUs like Ati’s CrossFireX or like NVIDIA’s SLI software technologies (both support up to >4< GPU cards working in parallel for GPGPU).

5. Since Snow Leopard, the biggest changes to [Mac] OS X have been user-facing feature and UI changes. I’m more interested in monumental changes to the “plumbing” running underneath, like Core APIs, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.

If developers are too lazy to avail their wares of G.C.D. or OpenCL, APPLE should incorporate these software technologies through and through THE OPERATING SYSTEM, so that any software written for [Mac] OS X >inherits< the skyrocketing performance improvements GPGPU affords NOT JUST to graphical apps!

With not a touch to the codebases of software apps by ISVs, their apps can automatically improve if the Frameworks, APIs and Core Technologies of OS X are MAJORLY improved by Apple!

6. I wanted effectively "Snow Mountain Lion" where Apple engineers (the one's still loitering around that haven't been conscripted by the iOS team) would MAJORLY revamp Grand Central Dispatch and work with AMD/ATi and NVIDIA to bring parallel GPU processing to [Mac] OS X. *AND* CUDA and ATi “Stream” to OpenCL.

7. Only some of the AMD/ATi FirePro GPUs are CrossFire-capable. I hope Apple is using something like the FirePro W9000 which IS CrossFire capable (that is IF Crossfire is ported to OS X or added to or emulated in GCD or OpenCL).

8. I'm assuming with high confidence that the FirePro GPUs will not be "cards" but will be incorporated onto the logic board (or a daughter card) of the overhauled new Mac Pro.

9. I'm assuming with neutral confidence that the radical redesign of the upcoming new Mac Pro motherboard will NOT be such a departure that it renders it incompatible with Bootcamp, Parallels and VMWare Fusion.

10. Schiller announced that it uses the next generation Xeon processor, up to twelve cores. Seeing the most processor cores listed on Intel's Xeon roadmap are 8, I am assuming a dual-cpu 6-core processor config. will be an option.

I know, I know, dual-processors are a waste of money because one often sits idle, or all cores of both processors are never used, but that is not the processors' fault, it is the fault of lazy programmers who don't program for Grand Central Dispatch as well as Apple's fault its lack of perseverance in steadily improving GCD.

Grand Central Dispatch introduced what at the time seemed like an exciting new paradigm that would have consequences far and wide for Mac Apps (and iOS Apps, for that matter), but it received a few tweaks in Lion and iOS 5, but has been languishing for years ever since.

"Maverick" should bring Developers and users alike Grand Central Dispatch 2.0 and nothing less. Enlist help, acquire the technology or the talent necessary to get it done.

OS X software will vastly improve and will go a long way toward product differentiation from the “photocopiers.” (And it will open up new high-end markets for Macs and OS X.)

11. The Xeon processors Intel will release during the second half of this year (we're already at the mid-year mark for 2013) can handle up to 12 Terabytes of memory.

Will the upcoming Mac Pro feature enough of RAM for Pro Applications (present and future) and for driving multiple 4K displays?

How much RAM will it come with?

Will it be non-user-serviceable like the 16GB 15" Retina MacBook Pro I forced myself to buy because I knew I couldn't upgrade the 8GB model?

(And if you think “Terabytes” of RAM seems beyond the pale, wait 18 months or so, and think it over again then. After all, Bill Gates once said he couldn’t imagine anyone ever needing more than 640K of RAM in a desktop computer.)

12. I would like to see Apple change from six Thunderbolt 2 connectors on two buses, to six Thunderbolt connectors on three buses. (Six on six is a pipe dream.)

13. It would be nice if the four USB 3 ports each had their own bus. (Pipe dream.)

15. I wish Apple planned to give it a 10GB Ethernet port, but I guess Gigabit Ethernet is what we'll get.

(Assuming Macs can still do this) Connecting multiple Macs for either Grid computing or Cluster computing or SMP is really only possible with Fibre Channel or 10GB Ethernet. And though 10GB Ethernet may be slower than the theoretical speed of Thunderbolt 2, it is an entrenched NETWORKING standard. 10GB Ethernet Switching boxes abound.

Gigabit Ethernet just doesn't cut it in this area.

16. This will get me flamed, but ditch the HDMI port and offer a Thunderbolt to HDMI adaptor instead.

If Apple wants to revolutionize TV with a future product where Display Port and Thunderbolt are key, perpetuating HDMI through OEM support right on the machine ill-serves this plan.

Consolidate standards. I'm not complaining that the upcoming Mac Pro lacks Firewire or eSATA for backward-compatibility. I'll adapt in the interest of consolidating the all too many connection standards.

17. Lastly, as a Pro user, there isn't much I'm willing to sacrifice in trade for a smaller form factor.

An expensive Pro Workstation is SOMETHING YOU MAKE ROOM FOR! (if you're serious). Pros rejected the G4 Cube for its tradeoffs, and there's already a Mac mini ( or as I like to call it, a non-portable laptop) and an iMac skinny.

If the much smaller size of the cylindrical Mac Pro came at the expense of power and performance, any convenience of the smaller form factor is not worth it (to me).

Just who does Apple expect to sell these to? You'd have to be prodigiously wasteful to buy one of these for a business, because you'll be forced to retire it as soon as any of its components are obsolete. A 2006 Mac Pro is still a perfectly functional machine, largely because you can easily replace the video and add new functionality (like a RAID controller, for instance) through the multiple expansion slots. You'd probably be running Windows on it now, because Apple abandoned it, but the hardware was awesome, and remains solid even now, seven years later.

This, on the other hand, is a showpiece; once something isn't good enough anymore, too bad, so sad, buy a new one.

Thunderbolt 2 is supposed to solve that problem. It can't make your CPU faster, but hopefully 12 cores last you a few years.

I just dread the dongle/external mess that will eventually accumulate from this. It's a stunning piece of hardware in the glass case, but 10 cords hanging off of it will sully the image.

I just hope there's enough Thunderbolt accessories for those who need expandability. It sounds like a few TB's of external storage are going to be a must-buy for anyone not served by the stock SSD this ships with.

RAM is still going to be a bit of a sore point. 4 slots is what you expect from a $500 Best Buy HP floor model, not a workstation, and Thunderbolt isn't nearly fast enough to expand that.

Even the old Mac Pro, which was actually designed like a workstation, was a trifle sparse; but four slots is a bad joke.

Meh... Another shiny toy from Apple, that's the norm. Not that I'm knocking Apple, they make great products, but anyone that can push cards into slots can build a PC with same specs or better for half the price (I'm betting on 3,500 and up).

This might be a nice machine to do a whole home integration with, running all electronics and entertainment out of a central location.....

There's a PC with 12 Xenon cores and PCIe flash storage that achieves 1 GBps write and 1.25 GBps read? Dual firepro GPUs with 6GB RAM each? [..]And a couple that don't matter to everyone, but do to many:

Runs (and officially supports) OS X?

Add a PCI-e SSD and two FireGL cards to the current Mac Pro, problem solved.

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In a tiny, low temp, highly attractive, presumably silent package?

While not tiny, the current Mac Pro case is low temp, attractive and relatively silent.

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6 Thunderbolt 2 ports?

These could be placed on to an ordinary PCI-e video card and thus give the current Mac Pro such capabilities.

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Built in the US?

Nothing stopped Apple from building the current Mac Pro in the USA.

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The base price of the previous gen mac pro was $2500, by the way.

The base price of the new Mac Pro will likely be higher due to the default config of dual GPU's.

So... no, no, no, no, and no. Got it.

My point being that this new model isn't really an upgrade over the previous model.

Most of what I've stated also applied to various workstation PC's with the notable exception of natively running OS X.

And yes, you can get a PC with 12 cores, two 6 GB video cards and a 1 GByte/s PCI-e based SSD - two years ago.

I thought that Mac Pro was one of the most beautiful designs of a destop of its time. Dissapointing that they went a glossy plastic bucket. Who cares about the technical innovations? It's not worth anything if they are sacrificing functionality and aethetics.

The “Later This Year” Mac Pro overhaul....6. I wanted effectively "Snow Mountain Lion" where Apple engineers (the one's still loitering around that haven't been conscripted by the iOS team) to MAJORLY revamp Grand Central Dispatch and work with AMD/ATi and NVIDIA to bring parallel GPU processing to [Mac] OS X. AND CUDA and ATi “Stream” to OpenCL.

7. Only some of the AMD/ATi FirePro GPUs are CrossFire-capable. I hope Apple is using something like the FirePro W9000 which IS CrossFire capable (that is IF Crossfire is ported to OS X or added to or emulated in GCD or OpenCL).

GCD is for code running on intel processors. OpenCL runs on GPUs. The two are not binary compatible.

edit: just to be clear, Grand Central Dispatch (GCD) is a way to make Mac intel code multithread-savvy. OpenCL is specifically for running code on GPUs.

I have a dog that sheds a lot as well... and so I find myself vacuuming quite a bit. How great is "great"? I haven't played with Dyson's products very much, but is it really above and beyond what else is out there?

Don't know about dogs, but my Dyson vacuum does a great job with the fur from our cats.

At the time, I probably wouldn't have gotten one myself (definitely would get another, though), but my previous vacuum cleaner conveniently died while I was vacuuming for a visit from my parents (a belt jammed with fur caused a plastic piece to snap). I mentioned the dead vacuum in my apology for the non-clean state of the carpet (with no ulterior motive), and my parents got me the Dyson as a gift. It doesn't have any belts (as far as I can tell) in the airflow path, which always has been the point of failure for my vacuums. I still have to cut fur out of the brushes a couple of times a year, but that's been true of every vacuum I've had. And it seems to do a really good job at collecting dust, too.

The new Pro will be all these thing too. I'm not super impressed by it, though, because I just can't see that the engineering has been done with the pro market in mind. It's a design statement, just like the Cube, and that one failed miserably.

The “Later This Year” Mac Pro overhaul.[...]2. Re: the two ATI FirePro GPUs: It wasn’t said that they would be used in >parallel< for GPGPU – long overdue on the Mac and a feature of PCs for 8 or 9 years.

For OpenCL work, this is nothing new to the Mac platform since OS X 10.7.

4. Or, will (See 2) [Mac] OS X “Mavericks” finally include parallel processing of multiple GPUs like Ati’s CrossFireX or like NVIDIA’s SLI software technologies (both support up to >4< GPU cards working in parallel for GPGPU).

CrossFire and SLI would be useful for 3D rendering. This right now is a big open question.

5. Since Snow Leopard, the biggest changes to [Mac] OS X have been user-facing feature and UI changes. I’m more interested in monumental changes to the “plumbing” running underneath, like Core APIs, Grand Central Dispatch and OpenCL.

If developers are too lazy to avail their wares of G.C.D. or OpenCL, APPLE should incorporate these software technologies through and through THE OPERATING SYSTEM, so that any software written for [Mac] OS X >inherits< the skyrocketing performance improvements GPGPU affords NOT JUST to graphical apps!

There were hints of some under the hood improvements but mostly cutting bloat and optimizations. Not to say that such moves are bad but they're just not new features.

With not a touch to the codebases of software apps by ISVs, their apps can automatically improve if the Frameworks, APIs and Core Technologies of OS X are MAJORLY improved by Apple!

6. I wanted effectively "Snow Mountain Lion" where Apple engineers (the one's still loitering around that haven't been conscripted by the iOS team) to MAJORLY revamp Grand Central Dispatch and work with AMD/ATi and NVIDIA to bring parallel GPU processing to [Mac] OS X. AND CUDA and ATi “Stream” to OpenCL.

For parallel processing it would be great but may not be as big of a performance win as you imagine. There is overhead in the handoff between the CPU and GPU that merits careful selection of when this would actually occur.

7. Only some of the AMD/ATi FirePro GPUs are CrossFire-capable. I hope Apple is using something like the FirePro W9000 which IS CrossFire capable (that is IF Crossfire is ported to OS X or added to or emulated in GCD or OpenCL).

9. I'm assuming with neutral confidence that the radical redesign of the upcoming new Mac Pro motherboard will NOT be such a departure that it renders it incompatible with Bootcamp, Parallels and VMWare Fusion.

There is no indication that this would be an different than what Apple does currently. There would be need for new boot camp drivers but that's par for the course with new Apple hardware.

10. Schiller announced that it uses the next generation Xeon processor, up to twelve cores. Seeing the most processor cores listed on Intel's Xeon roadmap are 8, I am assuming a dual-cpu 6-core processor config. will be an option.

I know, I know, dual-processors are a waste of money because one often sits idle, or all cores of both processors are never used, but that is not the processors' fault, it is the fault of lazy programmers who don't program for Grand Central Dispatch as well as Apple's fault its lack of perseverance in steadily improving GCD.[...]

Actually this complaint applies to n-cores regardless of how many sockets there are on a system. The single 12 core chip will experience these same issues.

11. The Xeon processors Intel will release during the second half of this year (we're already at the mid-year mark for 2013) can handle up to 12 Terabytes of memory.

I think that that is Ivy Bridge-EX and may only apply in quad or eight socket configuration, not the chip inside the new Mac Pro (just Ivy Bridge-E). The maximum amount of RAM in the new Mac Pro is 128 GB.

(And if you think “Terabytes” of RAM seems beyond the pale, wait 18 months or so, and think it over again then. After all, Bill Gates once said he couldn’t imagine anyone ever needing more than 640K of RAM in a desktop computer.)

I have a system at home with 128 GB of RAM. It was upgraded to that amount after hitting the page file a few times on Photoshop + Painter + Illustrator + heavy multitasking binges. With 128 GB, things have plenty of buffer room.

12. I would like to see Apple change from six Thunderbolt 2 connectors on two buses, to six Thunderbolt connectors on three buses. (Six on six is a pipe dream.)

There are actually three TB controllers in the new machine. This is likely where the three 4K display limit comes from. Technically the video cards can drive twelve 4K displays, at least in their PC incarnation.

15. I wish Apple planned to give it a 10GB Ethernet port, but I guess Gigabit Ethernet is what we'll get.

(Assuming Macs can still do this) Connecting multiple Macs for either Grid computing or Cluster computing or SMP is really only possible with Fibre Channel or 10GB Ethernet. And though 10GB Ethernet may be slower than the theoretical speed of Thunderbolt 2, it is an entrenched NETWORKING standard. 10GB Ethernet Switching boxes abound.

Gigabit Ethernet just doesn't cut it in this area.

Agreed but the lack of 10 Gbit Ethernet is not that surprising either.

That is a beautiful computer. One problem though: it's not a Mac Pro. Mac Pros have expansion slots, and, you know, a utilitarian form factor. They're workstations, not goddamn pieces of sculpture. Apple somehow managed to miss the point entirely on what is quite possibly the easiest-to-design device in their lineup. Give us a case that we can open, a computer that we can service, with expansion slots that we can populate with internal expansion devices. How hard would that have been?

This is actually pretty forward-looking in terms of hardware requirements for those who use Macs. What's the main use of the local workstation? You'll have dual/triple monitors, a need for some brutal local processing, but most of your storage will be either in the render farm or external NAS. This does exactly that. An iMac doesn't have the processing ability that this beast will have, and multiple monitors aren't exactly the iMac's forte. A mini won't have either of those as well.